Professor Fawcett made a good speech on Education at Bir-
mingham on Monday, after delivering the prizes awarded at the Midland Institute. He insisted that efficient primary education was the first condition of the usefulness of such institutions as that, since a grown-up man, however anxious to repair the faults- of his early education, must often waste a very great amount of most valuable time in acquiring what he might have learned as a child in a few months. He reiterated his caution against wide- spread but superficial study, and expressed his very strong sense of the disciplinary value of many studies which are not pursued, and. are not intended to be pursued, in after-life. But he maintained that different students should be allowed to choose their own intel- lectual discipline, so as to be in keeping with their aspirations and. interests, and mentioned cases in which the study of political economy takes hold of young men and develops their mental powers, after classics and mathematics have completely failed to awaken those powers. We should think the instances must be few. At least mathematics, properly taught, should appeal to and awaken very much the same kind of faculties as econo- mical reasoning. On the whole, on this head, we think Mr. Fawcett's doctrine a little dangerous. Young people are uncom- monly apt to think themselves antes incomprises, and so different from other people that they require a special intellectual regimen, —which is probably very seldom good for them. Political eco- nomy, however acutely studied, would not train a boy's faculties of deductive reasoning half as well as mathematics ; and it would give him none of the mental discipline of a well-taught language. After all, education ought to have something of real uniformity about it. The best thing it does is to teach men to understand each other, and how is it to do that, if they have all been brought up on different foods?
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